Above: The fleeing process

Above: Full View of Artwork

Above: Framed View

A whimsically rendered, Belle Epoque pen and ink illustration, presumably created for an early issue of LIFE magazine, addressing the adventures of growing old. A young girl on the left attempts to gain the attention of father time (viewed literally handing out birthdays off of an old cart) while Edwardian attired women on the right flee the aging process. This appears to be an illustration for a writing by Helen Ring Robinson, the author who in 1908 adapted a version of Uncle Tom’s cabin for children. Her name is ghost written in light pencil upper left below one of the 8 draining hour glasses.

Above: Detail

Above: The artists signature

Above: Detail of father time

Above: Detail

A biography on the artist

Illustrator Orson Lowell, the son of landscapist Milton H. Lowell, was born in 1871. He studied with the well-known anatomist, J. H. Vanderpoel, at the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois. He moved from Chicago to New York in 1893. Known for the richness of his work in pen and ink, he drew, in 1898, fifty illustrations for The Choir Invisible. By 1907, he was employed at Life magazine, at that time a humor publication competing with Judge and Punch. He became known for his cartoons with a social message. Lowell was a contemporary of, and often discussed in relation to, the famous illustrator Charles Dana Gibson.

In 1899, F. Marion Crawford published Saracinesca, a two-volume work with one hundred pen and ink drawings and reproductions of paintings by Lowell featuring images of Italian fountains, ancient buildings and bridges.

Lowell illustrated magazines like Life, Judge, The American Girl through the 1940’s. Before the decline of illustrated novels in the early 1920’s, Lowell created illustrations for works little-known today, Love in Old Clothes, 1896; C.N. and A.M. Williamson’s Lady Betty Across the Water, and the works of Charles de Kock.

Orson Byron Lowell died in 1956.

In 2002, Lowell’s work was represented in Toast of the Town: Norman Rockwell and the Artists of New Rochelle, an exhibition of twenty-five artists associated with that New York town, held at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts.